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"In a way, I find it paradoxical that people in the 20th century are making compositions using the resources of the 17th."

 

LIVINUS: for the FUTURE looks back on the advancing horizon of a visionary. Throughout his life, Livinus van de Bundt (1909-1979) sought to use light as a leitmotiv to push back the boundaries of the visual arts through experimentation and technology. However, as it turned out, his determined gaze ahead bore an expiration date. Celebrated in the 1960s, today his light art awaits its place in art history, a blind spot that this exhibition tries to illuminate.

Tellingly, Livinus' experimental career began in the 1930s when he destroyed his canvases for being "not luminescent enough". In the course of the graphic trajectory in black and white that was to follow, the artist realised, among other things, blind embossed prints – an inkless graphic technique through which an image is created by means of the shades of light cast by a printed relief.

Nevertheless, the 'photo-peintures' or 'light paintings' of the 1950s are considered to be the fulcrum of Livinus' efforts to bring painting up to the standards of his time. Inspired by, among other things, the photograms of Moholy-Nagy, he developed a technique that allowed him to create form and colour through light alone, without the use of a brush or a burin. By passing a coloured beam of light over a photographic emulsion, the artist created abstract compositions that are exhibited here both as slides and in their original light boxes.

From the early 1960s onwards, Livinus set his photopeintures in motion with the aid of an analogue projector of his own making: the 'lumodynamic machine', a colour organ with an implicit musical dimension. In the end however, he would, inspired by Nam June Paik, primarily explore the composition of light, movement and sound through video.  Together with his son, Jeep, Livinus may definitely be considered one of the pioneers of the medium in the Netherlands.

Although Livinus' experiments and devices appeared amongst a host of other light art practices, he embodies the dream of many an avant-garde artist in an entirely unique manner: technology as an ally, the gaze radically fixed on tomorrow - or rather, the day after tomorrow. He, however, was not able to witness the arrival of, say, the Internet and virtual reality, nor the general change in perspective. Since then, light years seem to have passed: the past has replaced the future, nostalgia has replaced utopia.

• Raf Wollaert

 

Thanks to:

Levina Floothuis-van de Bundt, Mike Floothuis, Gerrit-Jan de Rook, Ivo Van Vaerenbergh,

Lotte Beckwé, Nico Dockx & Raf Wollaert.

With the support of the Dutch Embassady in Brussels